Data may reside over a wide range of addressable storage space of a data store. With respect to some data stores, data may only be written incrementally through addressable storage space. With respect to random access data stores, such as, for example, disks and flash-based storage, data may be written in any order to any storage location. Although writing data in any order to any storage location may be convenient, often this approach is not very efficient for writing to the random access data stores. A most efficient approach for writing data to a random access data store is sequential writing of the data.
A random access data store, such as, for example, a modern disk drive, may be capable of moving approximately 700 kilobytes (KB) of data in an amount of time taken for the disk drive to seek an arbitrary location on a disk. As technology advances, disk drives may be capable of moving larger amounts of data during a same time period.
Most data transfers are much smaller than 700 KB. As a result, disk drives may spend a significant amount of time seeking locations on disks during non-idle time periods.